The best athlete in my class at school was a guy called Ray. The best by far – he’d be halfway around the 400 metre track before most of us had got to the first corner.

He had natural talent in abundance, far more than the rest of the class put together. (Admittedly, I did my best to make sure that wasn’t any harder than it needed to be, as I have the sporting prowess of a beached octopus.)

After winning every trophy at school, sometimes competing against boys two or three years older than him, we all expected Ray to be lining up for the next Olympics. Yet within a year or two he’d dropped out of athletics completely and, as far as I know, he’s never competed since.

The reason’s simple.

Because he could beat all his classmates easily, he stopped training as hard as he used to. He could win without going on that five mile run before school on a cold and drizzly winter morning.

Because he could beat us all easily, he thought nothing of staying out late at a party on a Friday before a competition on the Saturday morning. He still won.

Because he could beat us all easily, he started smoking to try to look even cooler than he did already (I know…different times…), and would have a drag behind the changing rooms before sprinting round the track to collect his medals.

In the good times, life was easy for Ray. He could do what he liked and still win every race. He became convinced he was unbeatable.

Except he wasn’t.

He had more natural talent than most of the people who were selected for the Olympics a few years later. No question.

His problem wasn’t a lack of talent, but rather that gradually, probably without consciously realising it, he started doing things that drained away the advantages his raw talent gave him. In the end, it was relatively simple for someone who trained every morning, didn’t go out partying the night before a race and didn’t smoke to do to Ray what Ray used to do to us.

Businesses are like that too.

I’ve been inside plenty of businesses over the years, but very few of them achieve their maximum potential.

Slowly, over time, without anybody realising it, businesses make enough decisions which turn out to be the equivalent of a ciggie break behind the PE block before a race. Short-term pleasure for long-term pain.

In good times, it might not matter too much. But in tough times, it’s the difference between success and failure…between thriving and not even surviving…between collecting the gold medal and wheezing around the track to finish after the winners have had their showers, got changed, collected their medals and headed for home.

That’s why, when I’m working with a client, although my objective is to grow their business, my first port of call is to see what might be holding them back.

There’s no point telling someone to train harder until they’ve give up their 20-a-day habit because any improvements will be tiny until they do and people quickly become disheartened by the lack of progress.

Kick the fags first, then we’ll start training hard. That’s how you’ll see the rapid improvements that keep you motived when training’s hard. You’ll get better and better faster than you thought possible.

It’s not the lack of potential that holds businesses back. Every business has the potential to be a world-beater.

But their potential is always capped by the number of “short-term gain, long-term pain” decisions they’ve taken along the way. Sooner or later it’s payback time.

Sort those out first and you’re knocking on the door of success a lot faster. Ultimately nobody can train hard enough to win the race while dragging behind them the dead weight of the decisions and behaviours that hold them back.

To get better faster, the starting point is to stop doing the things that make getting better harder.

If you’d like to know more about my book “Cash Flow Surge: 101 No-Cost and Low-Cost Strategies to Boost Your Business Cash Flow” here’s an interview I did with the excellent Samantha Kelly a little while back.

We look at some of the ways business owners can improve their cash flow and take some live questions.

You can find Sam at @TweetingGoddess on Twitter and via her website TweetingGoddess.com.

Sam is definitely worth a follow if you want to know how to build an online presence on Twitter and LinkedIn. As an extra bonus, she’s a really lovely person too…and nobody can have too many lovely people in their life, so give her a follow if you can.

You’ve probably come across…maybe even been on the receiving end of…the “praise sandwich”. That’s where a manager buries any negative feedback between two layers of praise. The idea being not to leave the employee at a low point at the end of the conversation.

Management training programmes often teach that “sweetening the bitter pill” of negative feedback with praise before and after is a gentle way to get people to improve their performance .

There’s a couple of problems with this approach.

Firstly, for some employees…hopefully not many…finding two things to praise them for so you can slip the negative feedback in the middle might be a bit of a stretch.

Secondly, and more seriously, it turns out the praise sandwich isn’t all that effective.

Think about it.

You want people to learn where they’ve under-performed and do something about to put that right next time. You want to leave them primed for action, not basking in the warm glow of having done a good job on something else.

Of course, some managers don’t enjoy conflict so shy away from the negative feedback anyway. So their direct reports get the mildest hint of under-performance mentioned briefly surrounded by extensive and lavish praise. They probably come away from that discussion with the feeling that they’re doing a great job and needn’t change anything.

By the same token, being over-critical isn’t right either. There’s no quicker way to switch off any sense of staff motivation than continually criticising someone, especially if they can’t do anything about the issues which cause that under-performance.

The other problem with the praise sandwich is the delays it can lead to.

Pretty much everyone agrees the right time to give any sort of feedback, positive or negative, is as close to the incident as possible while everything is fresh in people’s minds.

If you wait hours, days, weeks or months until you’ve racked up a couple of positive things to say alongside the negative one, most of the benefits of having that conversation are lost. Unless it’s an enormous issue, the longer the elapse of time between the incident taking place and receiving feedback, the more likely it is the staff member concerned won’t even remember the incident you want to give feedback about.

To make progress faster, praise people generously when they’ve done something excellent. Don’t store it up in case they do something wrong next week and you don’t have anything else to use as one of the positive layers in your praise sandwich.

By the same token, raise any concerns as quickly as possible too. The last thing you want is for an area of under-performance to become the norm just because you haven’t pulled people up about it for days or weeks. Then it’s twice as hard to get them to correct course and do things they way they should have been doing them all along because they have to “unlearn” the wrong way and re-learn the right way.

In the final analysis, however noble its intentions, staff members quickly get to recognise the praise sandwich when they see it and know what’s coming as soon as you’ve reeled off the first compliment. That takes the edge off any positive feedback you might give which means the net effect of this conversation is to leave them demotivated, when the stated intention of the praise sandwich is to leave people in a positive frame of mine.

This renders the whole purpose of the praise sandwich null and void.

When it comes to giving performance feedback, a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down is not nearly as effective as you’ve been led to believe.

People respect being told what they need to do better, as long as you do it in the right way and with the intention of helping them improve, rather than for point-scoring or to undermine them.

There’s no need for a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down when people know you’re on their side and cheering them on for the win. They’ll be happy to take any learning points and try their hardest to do better next time.

Which is what you want, after all.

According to recent Gartner research, in 2019 companies spent an average of $2,420 per person to enhance the employee experience in their business.

But increasingly “enhancing the employee experience” is leaving people cold – that same research found that only 13% of employees were fully satisfied with their employee experience at those businesses.

I don’t know about you, but if I was leading an initiative that failed 87% of the time, I wouldn’t be ploughing that particular furrow for very long. I’d try a bit harder to find something at least a working majority of employees actually did like.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that employee experience isn’t important. I wouldn’t have bothered leading a business to the Top 100 Places to Work in the UK listing if I thought that.

But in too many places, employee engagement has become one of those terrible tick-box initiatives deployed by the sort of people who went into HR careers despite clearly not liking other people all that much.

The exercise becomes never-ending wish lists for free coffee or on-site childcare or flexible working hours. And for every employee who likes a particular perk, there will be others who hate the very idea of it.

I vividly remember the childless, middle-aged lady at the business I took to the Top 100 Places to Work list who was incandescent at the idea we might help out young parents with childcare because it wasn’t going to benefit her directly. Sometimes you can’t do right for doing wrong.

So if you want to provide free coffee or flexible working, just decide to do it. Don’t make a song and dance about it.

That’s a 30 second decision. Forget the painful HR strategy development papers and subsequent detailed process-writing…not to mention the excruciating monthly management reports about how much coffee you’ve bought or how many people worked what hours.

HR Departments love this stuff, of course. They get to hire an Employee Experience Manager and go to a fresh set of HR Managers’ conferences. Because you’ve given someone a job of managing this, you’ll end up spending rather too much time in management meetings having them report to you on data 87% of your workforce, statistically speaking, doesn’t actually care very much about, and so probably has very little to do with making your business more successful.

Want to know how to make your staff feel like they’re having a better employee experience? It’s really simple.

Firstly, just give them free coffee and flexible working. Don’t agonise over it or over-complicate it.

Tell each department to work out the details themselves to make sure all the work is covered and everyone puts in their contracted hours over the course of a month. But apart from that leave them to it. This will cost you somewhere close to nothing.

Secondly, take the $2,420 per person you were going to spend on employee experience initiatives and give everyone a $2,420 pay rise. Sadly, for most people, especially front-line staff, that makes a huge difference to their standard of living and their ability to support their families. Certainly a lot more difference than a staff newsletter ever will.

Thirdly, make sure your senior people show up and demonstrate real leadership. That’s what most of your people want really. Of course, they’re not going to turn down a pay rise or some free coffee, but the business I ran got to the Top 100 Places to Work list by very publicly only paying average salaries for our jobs and our geographical area.

We told people this was our approach to setting salaries when they applied to work for us.

We didn’t bribe people into working for us by paying exorbitant salaries. We just showed them what working in a business with proper leadership looked like, and demonstrated we were empathetic to their needs and supportive of their personal and professional development.

Then we delivered on that promise. That’s pretty much all it took to be one of the country’s most admired employers.

And all the research suggests, outside your HR Department, 87% of your staff will be more satisfied with those outcomes than anything an Employee Experience Manager could dream up.

My kids love the TV programme “SAS: Who Dares Wins”. If you haven’t seen the show, a group of ex-Special Forces instructors put members of the public…and occasional celebrities…through their paces as if they were on the famously-tough SAS selection course.

I don’t imagine for a moment the TV show covers every challenge real applicants to the UK’s most elite special forces endure. But, frankly, I wouldn’t even do the version we see on TV, so I take my hat off to those who try it for real.

Recently they’ve introduced a new test where “recruits” are given a rifle then blindfolded, dragged through the undergrowth by an instructor, being pushed, shoved and shouted at constantly while explosions erupt all around them.

Once they’re thoroughly disorientated, recruits’ hoods are whipped off. Now they have a split-second to decide whether to “shoot” a figure dressed in all in black who’s sprinting out a building towards them, carrying a firearm.

There’s the tiniest clues, easily overlooked when you’re completely disorientated and confused – a shoulder-patch with the flag of a friendly country, perhaps.

That’s the split second decision. Friend or foe? End a life or save a life?

Get it right and you’re special forces material. Get it wrong and you’re the one going home in a body bag if you’re on your own behind enemy lines.

Thankfully that’s not a decision most of us will ever make…on TV or in real life.

But it’s not unlike the crazy, chaotic, fast-paced world of business. Several times a day, you’ve make split second decisions with long-term consequences.

Do you apologise to the customer, even if it wasn’t your fault, or tell them to get lost?

Do you fire a member of staff, or accept everyone, including you, makes mistakes from time to time?

Do you make promises with a straight face to customers, funders and lenders knowing your chances of delivering on them are slim, or have a difficult conversation now and try to work out a way forward everyone can live with?

The coward’s way out is always to take the “obvious” action.

If someone’s running towards you carrying a gun, you shoot.

If the customer is technically in the wrong, per your 40-page terms and conditions, you tell them to get lost.

If the staff member has done something silly, you prove who’s boss by firing them.

If customers, lenders or funders are putting you under pressure, you tell them what they want to hear for now and hope you can weasel out of delivering somewhere down the line.

It’s easy to “hit the target” and do the obvious thing. That’s much, much easier than pausing for a split second to think more broadly about the situation.

Heroes…the sort of people who work in special forces…are specifically trained not to take the coward’s way out and blast away at every target regardless.

Smart business leaders do the same. They apologise to the customer, they give that staff member another chance, they tell the truth to lenders and investors, even if that causes them problems in the short-term.

Cowards shoot first and ask questions later. Heroes know when not to pull the trigger.

If you’re a music fan like me, this article’s title will immediately make you think of what’s widely considered the first rap record to “go mainstream”. “Rapper’s Delight” was a UK Number 3 in December 1979 and a US Top 40 hit in early 1980 for the Sugarhill Gang.

But that’s not what I’m writing about today.

Today it’s all about rappers bringing delight to their audience. And the way one rapper in particular does it.

I recently read Glenn Fisher’s excellent book “The Art of the Click” (which I’d highly recommend).

Glenn tells the story of going to a Drake concert and the way Drake engaged his audience.

There’s not enough space for me to do Glenn’s story justice here. You need to buy his book for that.

But there’s a really important lesson for every business in the concert experience Glenn describes.

And it’s this…

If you really want to delight your customers, you have to work with them. You have to involve them in the process. You have to make them feel what you’re doing is for them You have to make an impact on them as individuals.

Too often, groups of managers get together in windowless conference rooms without a customer in sight and set out to deliver “customer delight”, or some such nonsense expression.

Take it from me. You’ll never deliver customer delight that way. Often the outcome of those meetings cheese customers off more than it makes them happy, in my experience.

For delight…the sort of reaction you hope will inspire years of loyalty from your customer base…you have to connect with your customers in ways most businesses don’t.

And while there are some challenges to doing this, it’s not nearly as hard as you’d think.

Delight depends on your mindset. It’s all about how you make deep connections with individual customers. And, unless your organisation is currently in a state of utter disorganisation, it’s rarely about introducing new procedures or buying a new CRM system (despite what business consultants and CRM system vendors would have you believe).

If the top-selling male solo artist of all time can make those sorts of connections with people they’ve never met and create delight for their gazillions of fans in the way Glenn describes, I’m absolutely certain you can do the same or better with your dozens or hundreds or thousands of customers.

You might not become a multi-platinum recording artist, but you’ll certainly run the most successful business in your sector.

And you don’t need to be a rapper for that to bring delight to your balance sheet.

I used to do an exercise with clients where I’d show them sections clipped from their website and similar sections clipped from their competitors’ websites. The challenge was to identify which sections were theirs.

Spoiler alert – I almost never got the right answer. Even when I did, people usually admitted it was just a lucky guess.

Too many businesses forget that when they look exactly the same as every other potential supplier, that only leaves price as the basis for purchasing decisions. Over time, you’ll end up as one of hundreds of commodity suppliers, all competing on price.

Many businesses seem to prefer the anonymity of conformity to standing out. It feels “safer” perhaps, but being like everyone else is actually the riskiest thing a business can do.

Here’s one example why – according to a recent survey virtually 100% of companies say they provide excellent customer service, but only 80% of managers think their company actually provides superior customer service.

More worryingly, only 8% of their customers agree with those managers’ opinions.

Can you imagine how easy it would be to stand out from your competitors by providing excellent customer service when 92% of your potential customers don’t think anyone in your industry provides that?

More to the point…why would you copy ways of working that 92% of your potential customers already don’t like?

This isn’t just about customer service, though.

Try the same exercise I used to take clients through. Get someone to copy-and-paste your website and the websites of five or six competitors into a plain Word document, removing any images and company names and jumble them up.

Can you tell them apart? Can you tell which is yours?

Almost certainly not. And guess what…neither can your customers.

You’ll never beat your competitors by copying them. The opportunities for smart business people to do something different…provided they deliver on their promises…are huge.

What’s stopping you?

Business owners ask me questions like this a lot – what should my margin be…what rate of sales growth should we be achieving…what return on capital should we target?

However this misses an important point.

Many of the metrics people talk about are relatively useless in the context of an individual business. That’s not what they were designed for.

The alphabet soup of GM, ROI, ROCE, ROIC, etc, etc were invented to make it easy for banks and investors to compare one company in a sector with another.

But this is irrelevant to most business owners because they’re not usually deciding whether to invest in their own business or in one of their competitors. They’re either going to invest in their own business or not at all.

So there’s only one answer to the question “what should metric X be”…and that’s “as good as possible, in the context of your business, operations and customer base”.

Here’s just one example.

Landing fees are a big cost to airlines. But the landing fees Ryanair pays at its out-of-the-way airports are a fraction of the landing fees British Airways pays to land a jumbo jet at London Heathrow.

That’s because one airline wants to keep their landing fees as low as possible, entirely consistent with their mission to fly people round Europe for pennies.

The other airline willingly incurs much higher landing fees because that gives them access to more affluent passengers who prioritise convenience and service over cost in their purchasing decisions.

So any comparison between the two is relatively meaningless. Yes, they’re both airlines, but in reality they’re each in a completely different business, trying to attract a completely different group of customers.

Stop comparing your business to other businesses. Decide what customers you want to serve and try to deliver as much value as possible to your chosen customers while making a for profit yourself.

Most of the time, comparing your business with your competitors won’t make your business more successful. They’re doing their thing their way. You should be doing your thing your way. The chances of that leading to the exact same performance metrics for you both is tiny.